Menu

There is no precedent; we need new ways.

January 10, 2011 By BC, Community, Design, Emergence, Flow, Leadership

Theses on Sustainability:

[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.

A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent.  The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale.  Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered.  But it will depend on “ways.”

Ways are roads.  We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time.  While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system.  Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile.  Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern.  His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.

In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future.  If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens.  Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.

The week’s tweets

January 9, 2011 By Notes

  • At Disneyland.

    Yes. #

  • Roof top lunch in Santa Monica. #
  • Caitlin: a good life skill is to take every opportunity to look at babies. #
  • http://yfrog.com/gyacennj new moon, sunset in the desert at an empty and cheap resort in Palm Springs CA. Ty priceline! #
  • Last night the katabatic wind coated the car in a fine layer of dust. Today the desert is bright and clear. #

On my way home

January 8, 2011 By Travel, Uncategorized 3 Comments

Balanced at Keys Lookout, Joshua Tree National Park, CA

At the end of a week in california with the family, capped off by some short hikes and a rock balancing session in Joshua Tree National Park. Beautiful, but disturbing. This photo is of a rock balanced at 4800 feet overlooking the Coachella Valley which is filled with smog that blows in from the Los Angeles basin. A little bit of balance restored.

The week’s tweets

January 2, 2011 By Notes One Comment

  • Such a clean, clearing, steady wind this morning drying everything and freshening the tops of the firs. Not a wren to be seen! #
  • Gomes manages to play goal like a bumblebee manages to fly: it violates the laws of physics but it seems to work. #coys #
  • Bowen Islanders…make a NewYears resolution to learn some of the local Skw language: http://bit.ly/hGCVAJ @squamishlang #
  • After screen of storms with wind and rain it would be fair to say that the morning appears "relaxed." #
  • Winter morning http://post.ly/1OrT9 #
  • Another calm carnelian colored dawn http://yfrog.com/h0f63dnj #

The effect of the feminine

December 30, 2010 By Emergence, Flow, Organization


I continue to learn about the effect of the feminine.  Today I was walking with friends by Bridal Falls on Bowen Island where I live and we stopped at the waterfall to reflect on the nature of flow.  This standing wave caught our attention and it immediately drew me into thoughts on the complementarity of the masculine and feminine.

For a long time I have been a student of the Tao, understanding the relationship between yang and yin.  In Taoist thought, these two conditions exist in everything and are in constant and dynamic relationship.  Yang is usually thought of as raw force, flow, life or energy, and yin is idenitfied with receptivity, structure, container.  The two are also associated with masculine and feminine but not in a gender way, more in an archetypal fashion.

This video illustrates the power of having these two forces acheive some kind of balanace.  You have the strong yang of the water flowing over the strong yin of the rock and it is shaped by what it is flowing over.  We are looking at a remarkable thing here: a stable structure in which every element of its composition is changing in every minute.  This flow structure perfectly illustrates what happens when yin and yang meet in balance, when the strong masculine is shaped by the contours of the feminine.  We are seeing the effect of the feminine on the masculine, but we are looking at a structure that would not exist without a balance between the two.

Think about this in terms of organizations.  We are surrounded in our social world by these kinds of flow structures, in which elements move through but the structure remains.  Traffic jams, cities, organizations, schools…Notice that the stability in these structures comes not from what is flowing though them – not the people – but by the underlying architecture that shapes people’s behaviour in those moments.  The flow of bodies and behaviours is influenced by the yin of the structure.

This is one way the feminine works with power: by being the channel though which power works, influencing it’s outcome.  People who seek power with a strictly masculine perspective go for the flow itself: control of the money, people, water, oil.  People who seek to stabilize the effect of power know that the contours of the flow channels influence everything, so they run banks and financial systems, management consulting firms, hydro power projects and fossil fuel economics respectively.